Kim Fowley, record producer - obituary

Record producer who said Slade could be as big as the Beatles and created the
all-girl group the Runaways

Kim FowleyPhoto: MICHAEL PUTLAND/RETNA UK

6:14PM GMT 16 Jan 2015

Kim Fowley, who has died aged 75, was a record producer, singer, composer and entrepreneur who rejoiced in describing himself as the most reprehensible man in pop music; he was as renowned for his shameless opportunism and self-mythologising as for his musical achievements.

In a career spanning more than 50 years, Fowley worked with a bewildering variety of artists – including Gene Vincent, Helen Reddy and Kiss – and gathered a cult following for a series of albums recorded under his own name, including Animal God of the Streets, Outrageous and I’m Bad (which moved one critic to liken Fowley to “a cross between Captain Beefheart and a wild puking animal”).

The Runaways

His most conspicuous success, however, was with the Los Angeles all-girl group the Runaways, whom he created in the 1970s, and who at one time were the biggest-selling American group in Japan. Fowley claimed that the Runaways were inspired by reading a biography of the Beatles, a book about blondes in the cinema and A Clockwork Orange.

“It took about an hour to figure it out. Nobody liked being in the band, nobody liked each other in the band. The media hated it – everybody hated it, except the public.”

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As well as managing the group, Fowley produced and co-wrote the songs for their first two albums; but they parted company after two years, amid accusations that he had refused to feed them properly on a Japanese tour and had “verbally taunted” band members.

Fowley’s fortunes were built on a shrewd understanding of every scam and angle the music business had to offer, and a determined refusal to take himself seriously.

“I don’t think in artistic terms,” he once said. “I’m a pimp and a hustler and a packager and a conceptualist. I’m as gifted and sensitive and intelligent as all these other pricks who claim to be those things – I’m actually better. But I use it as a weapon, not as a basis.”

Kim Vincent Fowley was born on July 21 1939 in Los Angeles. His mother, Shelby Payne, was a model and sometime actress who played the cigarette girl in The Big Sleep and had affairs with Howard Hughes and Humphrey Bogart. “Unfortunately,” Fowley once observed, “she also had an affair with my father.” Douglas Fowley was an actor and an alcoholic who played Doc Holliday in the 1950s television series Wyatt Earp.

By his own account, at the age of two Fowley was dispatched to a foster home, where he would spend the next five years “with 27 children in a large room fighting for the cinnamon toast”. Having survived a bout of polio, he went to University High School in Los Angeles, where he developed an interest in music, singing with a group called the Sleepwalkers that included his classmates Bruce Johnston (later of the Beach Boys) and the drummer Sandy Nelson, along with a young Phil Spector.

After a short spell in the US military, Fowley floated on to the Hollywood music scene, working as a promotions man and record producer. In 1960 he co-produced and sang on the single Alley Oop, a pastiche of the doo-wop style . It went to No 1 in the American charts, selling one million copies. The following year he conceived Nutrocker, a frenetic pastiche of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite performed by a group of session musicians under the name B Bumble and the Stingers which reached No 1 in Britain.

Kim Fowley with the Runaways (MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES)

He enjoyed a second American success in 1964, with a gloopy girl-group confection, Popsicles and Icicles, by the Murmaids, which was knocked off the top of the American charts by the Beatles’ first US No 1, I Want To Hold Your Hand.

Fowley came to London, where he worked as a publicity man for his friend PJ Proby, wrote songs for Cat Stevens and the Seekers, and produced early incarnations of Traffic and Slade. Noddy Holder, Slade’s lead singer, would later remember how Fowley had “discovered” them at a London club in 1966: “There was this strange character in the audience, about 7ft tall, a beanpole, wearing a cowboy hat and doing all this hippie dancing with his arms flailing about. And after the show he came up and told us we could be as big as the Beatles. ”

Fowley produced one single with the group, which sank without trace, then returned to America. “Van Morrison and Them had had a big hit with Gloria in the States but then split up,” Holder remembered. “Kim wanted us to go back with him and go on tour pretending to be Them. He was a rogue, but a very lovable rogue.”

Psychedelia

Hardly a bandwagon passed by without Fowley jumping on it. In the late 1960s it was psychedelia; in the 1970s he moved to Finland, where he produced a group called Wigwam (“the Finnish Beatles”, according to Fowley); and then to Sweden, where he produced Scorpion (“the Swedish Beatles”).

He went on to produce Helen Reddy and Vicky Leandros, and – “just for the sheer joy of it” – Christian family music in Detroit. A friend once visited Fowley at his home in Hollywood at a time when environmentalism was coming to the fore, and found him writing songs for a putative band he planned to call Ecology.

In 2009 an assortment of offcuts and oddities which Fowley had recorded and produced under a variety of pseudonyms were gathered together on two albums, One Man’s Garbage and Another Man’s Gold .

Tall and cadaverous

Fowley enjoyed great success as the composer and publisher of songs for such bestselling heavy metal groups as Poison, Guns N’ Roses and Kiss, which he claimed had funded profitable investments in a range of businesses from minerals in Australia to hotels in Spain.

Tall, cadaverous and poker-faced, Fowley cut an unsettling figure on the Los Angeles music scene . In his latter years he retreated to the unlovely desert town of Redlands, better known for its drive-by shootings than for its music scene. There he lived in a small woodframe house fronted by an almost sinisterly manicured lawn and surrounded by an industrial chain-link fence posted with “Keep Out” signs. Gold and platinum records were propped against the sitting-room wall, “to remind media people and investors who I am”.

He worked as a volunteer counselling cancer patients and claimed to be a regular churchgoer – “Catholic and Mormon”. He was one of the few people in California who never learnt to drive.

Kim Fowley married once, in the 1980s, but the union lasted only 68 days; he had no children.